The Biofuels debate

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson

6 October 2007

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil

To be fair, both sides of the argument contain elements of reason. No one denies that energy sustainability is a pressing issue — and that wind, wave and solar energy, though theoretically unlimited, will only get us so far. Besides, biofuels have been around for centuries. They first appeared in Britain in the 1630s when farmers set aside land to grow hay to feed drayhorses raised to pull canalboats. The first cars, ironically, were designed to be powered by biofuels — the German inventor Rudolf Diesel designed his eponymous engine to run on peanut oil, while Henry Ford wanted his Model T to run on ethanol. Then huge petroleum reserves were discovered in the US, and biofuels were largely forgotten.

There are also huge profits to be made: Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA predicts the global biofuels market to be worth £75 billion a year by 2020. The main beneficiaries will be the giants of agribusiness — the likes of Cargill of the US, France’s Louis Dreyfus Group, and rising powers such as Noble Group and China’s COFCO. Others expected to profit are the world’s leading oil and gas groups. BP, Shell and ExxonMobil have all been playing both sides of the game — lobbying against biofuels via non-government organisations such as the Asian Clean Fuels Association, while simultaneously upping their own biofuel interests in order not to lose out.

Yet there’s a distinct sense of blind hope about the way most governments have gone about setting biofuel targets. For a continent that has consistently set the global tone on emissions, pollution and land conservation, Europe’s breathless estimates on biofuels seem particularly misguided. To hit its target of 80 billion litres of biofuels by 2020, Europe will need to ramp up its imports enormously, notably of soy and soymeal. Inevitably, most of that increase will come from South America, in particular from 200,000 square miles of land encompassing southern Brazil, northern Argentina, and parts of Paraguay and Bolivia. Once semi-arid rainforest, it is now mostly cleared, creating a semi-autonomous region known locally as the ‘Republic of Soy’.

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David Hutton-Squire

October 10th, 2007 11:01pm Report this comment

In the middle of his article, Mr. Wilson writes: "A single ton of refined palm oil generates 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions - 10 times more than petroleum." I should like to know how he arrives at this statement. The chemistry tells us that combining one ton of the carbon in the oil (atomic weight 14) with oxygen (atomic weight 16) would create 3.28 tons of CO2, assuming complete combustion and ignoring production costs, which might be rounded to 3.3 tons. Is this a journalistic slip of a decimal point? A pity that he has used the 33 tons figure to make a strong point against the use of a biofuel oil in comparison with fossil oil. I note that nearly identical articles by Mr. Wilson have appeared in other publications with the same error, so this does not look like a Spectator sub-editing problem. (Pity so few subs study chemistry!) There are plenty of other arguments in the palm oil / CO2 debate which show it is not a satisfactory option. for example see the Guardian report at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/0,,2049671,00.html Or just Google: palm oil CO2.

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